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Oh Google - never stop being you. Not only is it going to be opt-out (because of course it would be coming from Google), I really like the whole "wait a week b

Oh Google - never stop being you. Not only is it going to be opt-out (because of course it would be coming from Google), I really like the whole "wait a week before sending telemetry" part that just coincidentally has the benefit of sneaking right past people that actively look for suspicious network activity when they've freshly installed something. Am I being uncharitable?

geodel 4y ago
[flagged]
Thaxll 4y ago
Very popular programming language and IDE have telemetry on by default, VSCode, C#, Java etc ... People act like they discover telemetry in 2023. I don't think it's a big deal, ultimately it's to improve Go and the proposal makes it very easy to disable it ( single env variable ).
- alyandon 4y ago
  I think they should all be opt-in as well. However, as a developer and pretend sysadmin, I am generally a nice guy about not turning off telemetry on software products with a user facing UI that I use frequently.
- xh-dude 4y ago
  Totally agree. Telemetry has been around and matured and benefits users. I’m not sure the benefits for Go would be as significant as other software but, really, why not?
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > Telemetry has been around and matured and benefits users. Does it? Telemetry mostly seems used to justify removing features I need on grounds that they’re little used. As an other user noted, if telemetry is your yardstick, the average backup software removed the “restore” feature because that’s barely ever used.
    - xh-dude 4y ago
      I don’t like this example in particular because observing too much “restore” activity is an excellent piece of information.
      - masklinn 4y ago
        I fail to see what’s that got to “too much” restore activity doesn’t tell you anything actionable about your software, if anything it’s creepy as hell.
    - arp242 4y ago
      There is a long list of use cases, which go far beyond "removing features": https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses "Is it safe to remove support for X?" is one use case. Right now the strategy more or less amounts to "remove and see if anyone complains, possibly too late to change".
      - JetSpiegel 4y ago
        > Is it safe to remove support for X? What the hell, it's a freaking compiler. What do you mean, "too late to change"? Fail the compilation is suddenly a showstopper bug? If go wants to deprecate features, just follow the same procedure done by literally all other non-spyware compilers.
    - jiggawatts 4y ago
      Microsoft deprecated the disk-image backup in Windows 7 because it was infrequently used... buy random grandparents. It was basically a "free" wrapper on top of the Volume Shadow Service (VSS) built into the operating system, but only IT professionals ever used it, so... it had to go.
- mort96 4y ago
  What the hell? "People act like they discover telemetry in 2023"? Are we just going to ignore the fact that the issue of companies spying on their users has been a hotly discussed controversial topic since the practice began? Do you think objection to telemetry first appeared in 2023?
- ptx 4y ago
  > VSCode, C# These are both Microsoft products. Microsoft's position is well known. > Java etc ... Really? Which Java distribution? It's definitely opt-in in Jetbrains IDEs.
agwa 4y ago
Since you asked, yes you are being uncharitable. It's rather hard to imagine that the people who are details-oriented enough to look for suspicious network activity after installing something wouldn't notice the disclosure on the download page (edit: or the release notes). On the other hand, the explanation given by Russ for delaying a week (so people have ample time to opt-out) makes sense. Do you actually think Russ' explanation is just a pretext so they can evade detection by people who monitor for suspicious network activity (yet don't notice the disclosure on the download page)?
- alyandon 4y ago
  I am jaded and probably being a little uncharitable. However, I don't know Russ personally so I have no reason to place a high level of confidence that a Google employee isn't going to make decisions that align more with Google's interests vs privacy interests. Regardless, there are plenty of ways to upgrade the Go tool chain (snaps, distro packages, fetching latest via curl, etc) that won't result in the changes being immediately visible. Given that, I think you are painting an overly optimistic picture of a world though where everyone that cares about this is going to be immediately aware that opt-out telemetry has been added vs a lot of installs being silently swept up into this by sheer ignorance. Also, this is going to require me to go and set environment variables in about a dozen environments to disable the collection and while I can pretty easily manage that task via ansible I'm not happy about having to jump through hoops to turn off telemetry for a freaking compiler tool chain.
  - agwa 4y ago
    > I am jaded and probably being a little uncharitable. However, I don't know Russ personally so I have no reason to place a high level of confidence that a Google employee isn't going to make decisions that align more with Google's interests vs privacy interests. If the nature of this data were different, I would be suspicious too. But it's really hard for me to see how a set of counters (whose names have various protections to ensure they can't contain private information) being sent approximately once a year is going to help with Google's advertising interests (which is what I assume you meant by "Google's interests"; I think they also have an interest in making Go better and the telemetry proposal aligns with that). This is literally the first time I've been OK with telemetry. > Regardless, there are plenty of ways to upgrade the Go tool chain (snaps, distro packages, fetching latest via curl, etc) that won't result in the changes being immediately visible. Given that, I think you are painting an overly optimistic picture of a world though where everyone that cares about this is going to be immediately aware that opt-out telemetry has been added vs a lot of installs being silently swept up into this by sheer ignorance. I agree there will be people who won't notice the disclosure (which will also be in the release notes), but again I tend to think that the people sniffing network traffic after installing a program would also scrutinize release notes instead of just blindly installing upgrades, which is why I find it pretty improbable that Russ' explanation was a pretext. > Also, this is going to require me to go and set environment variables in about a dozen environments to disable the collection and while I can pretty easily manage that task via ansible I'm not happy about having to jump through hoops to turn off telemetry for a freaking compiler tool chain. I think the best suggestion I've seen is that there should be a single environment variable (e.g. $TELEMETRY) that all programs should respect, to avoid the need to do work for every application.
tveita 4y ago
Google is institutionally incapable of producing software that doesn't track its users over the internet. One example is the stock calculator app on Android, which according to their privacy statement may track your app interactions, device id, and email. Like what if users actually subtract more than they add or something. https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.google.android.calculator https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.google.... Or the wallpapers they include on your phone - you guessed it! https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.google.android.apps.wallpaper https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.google.... If that's the kind of environment you work in I'm not surprised this proposals seems modest by comparison.
- JetSpiegel 4y ago
  As the saying goes, companies ship their org chart, and Google's is what, 90% ads?

geodel 4y ago

[flagged]

Thaxll 4y ago

Very popular programming language and IDE have telemetry on by default, VSCode, C#, Java etc ... People act like they discover telemetry in 2023. I don't think it's a big deal, ultimately it's to improve Go and the proposal makes it very easy to disable it ( single env variable ).

alyandon 4y ago
I think they should all be opt-in as well. However, as a developer and pretend sysadmin, I am generally a nice guy about not turning off telemetry on software products with a user facing UI that I use frequently.
xh-dude 4y ago
Totally agree. Telemetry has been around and matured and benefits users. I’m not sure the benefits for Go would be as significant as other software but, really, why not?
- masklinn 4y ago
  > Telemetry has been around and matured and benefits users. Does it? Telemetry mostly seems used to justify removing features I need on grounds that they’re little used. As an other user noted, if telemetry is your yardstick, the average backup software removed the “restore” feature because that’s barely ever used.
  - xh-dude 4y ago
    I don’t like this example in particular because observing too much “restore” activity is an excellent piece of information.
    - masklinn 4y ago
      I fail to see what’s that got to “too much” restore activity doesn’t tell you anything actionable about your software, if anything it’s creepy as hell.
  - arp242 4y ago
    There is a long list of use cases, which go far beyond "removing features": https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses https://research.swtch.com/telemetry-uses "Is it safe to remove support for X?" is one use case. Right now the strategy more or less amounts to "remove and see if anyone complains, possibly too late to change".
    - JetSpiegel 4y ago
      > Is it safe to remove support for X? What the hell, it's a freaking compiler. What do you mean, "too late to change"? Fail the compilation is suddenly a showstopper bug? If go wants to deprecate features, just follow the same procedure done by literally all other non-spyware compilers.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    Microsoft deprecated the disk-image backup in Windows 7 because it was infrequently used... buy random grandparents. It was basically a "free" wrapper on top of the Volume Shadow Service (VSS) built into the operating system, but only IT professionals ever used it, so... it had to go.
mort96 4y ago
What the hell? "People act like they discover telemetry in 2023"? Are we just going to ignore the fact that the issue of companies spying on their users has been a hotly discussed controversial topic since the practice began? Do you think objection to telemetry first appeared in 2023?
ptx 4y ago
> VSCode, C# These are both Microsoft products. Microsoft's position is well known. > Java etc ... Really? Which Java distribution? It's definitely opt-in in Jetbrains IDEs.

agwa 4y ago

Since you asked, yes you are being uncharitable. It's rather hard to imagine that the people who are details-oriented enough to look for suspicious network activity after installing something wouldn't notice the disclosure on the download page (edit: or the release notes). On the other hand, the explanation given by Russ for delaying a week (so people have ample time to opt-out) makes sense. Do you actually think Russ' explanation is just a pretext so they can evade detection by people who monitor for suspicious network activity (yet don't notice the disclosure on the download page)?

alyandon 4y ago
I am jaded and probably being a little uncharitable. However, I don't know Russ personally so I have no reason to place a high level of confidence that a Google employee isn't going to make decisions that align more with Google's interests vs privacy interests. Regardless, there are plenty of ways to upgrade the Go tool chain (snaps, distro packages, fetching latest via curl, etc) that won't result in the changes being immediately visible. Given that, I think you are painting an overly optimistic picture of a world though where everyone that cares about this is going to be immediately aware that opt-out telemetry has been added vs a lot of installs being silently swept up into this by sheer ignorance. Also, this is going to require me to go and set environment variables in about a dozen environments to disable the collection and while I can pretty easily manage that task via ansible I'm not happy about having to jump through hoops to turn off telemetry for a freaking compiler tool chain.
- agwa 4y ago
  > I am jaded and probably being a little uncharitable. However, I don't know Russ personally so I have no reason to place a high level of confidence that a Google employee isn't going to make decisions that align more with Google's interests vs privacy interests. If the nature of this data were different, I would be suspicious too. But it's really hard for me to see how a set of counters (whose names have various protections to ensure they can't contain private information) being sent approximately once a year is going to help with Google's advertising interests (which is what I assume you meant by "Google's interests"; I think they also have an interest in making Go better and the telemetry proposal aligns with that). This is literally the first time I've been OK with telemetry. > Regardless, there are plenty of ways to upgrade the Go tool chain (snaps, distro packages, fetching latest via curl, etc) that won't result in the changes being immediately visible. Given that, I think you are painting an overly optimistic picture of a world though where everyone that cares about this is going to be immediately aware that opt-out telemetry has been added vs a lot of installs being silently swept up into this by sheer ignorance. I agree there will be people who won't notice the disclosure (which will also be in the release notes), but again I tend to think that the people sniffing network traffic after installing a program would also scrutinize release notes instead of just blindly installing upgrades, which is why I find it pretty improbable that Russ' explanation was a pretext. > Also, this is going to require me to go and set environment variables in about a dozen environments to disable the collection and while I can pretty easily manage that task via ansible I'm not happy about having to jump through hoops to turn off telemetry for a freaking compiler tool chain. I think the best suggestion I've seen is that there should be a single environment variable (e.g. $TELEMETRY) that all programs should respect, to avoid the need to do work for every application.

tveita 4y ago

Google is institutionally incapable of producing software that doesn't track its users over the internet. One example is the stock calculator app on Android, which according to their privacy statement may track your app interactions, device id, and email. Like what if users actually subtract more than they add or something. https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.google.android.calculator https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.google.... Or the wallpapers they include on your phone - you guessed it! https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.google.android.apps.wallpaper https://play.google.com/store/apps/datasafety?id=com.google.... If that's the kind of environment you work in I'm not surprised this proposals seems modest by comparison.

JetSpiegel 4y ago
As the saying goes, companies ship their org chart, and Google's is what, 90% ads?